How to monitor the Tag Engine status over a Ethernet network ?

[Giovani]

Hi everyone !!

I want to be able to obtain the status of the Tag Engine over a Ethernet network, i.e, suppose I have two PCs, PC_A and PC_B, what I want to do is to be able to obtain the status of the Tag Engine of PC_B running a subVI on PC_A. I fought about using some VI Server features but neither could I find some I could use to my advantage nor the Get Engine Status.vi has any imput parameters - it seems it can only be used locally.

I know I can run the VI locally on PC_B and then use the VI Server to send the status to PC_A but is there another way to do it ?

Thank you everyone who took sometime to read and think about this message and ...

Happy New Year to you all 🙂

[aartjan]

There are many ways to solve your problem. You may want to consider how, when, how often and in what format you want to get the information.

*An easy alternative could be to use datasocket. Do something like as follows:
-run the datasocket server on computer B.
-have Tag engine.vi write status messages to datasocket periodically. (overwriting or cumulatively)
-have a datasocket client on computer A: this downloads the status messages for you to read and clears the messages from the server.
This is simple to make and can give you a history of the vi status. It would however be more involved to request the status at any point in time. In that case you would have the following:
-run the datasocket server on computer B,
-send a status request message from computer A to the DS server
-after the message is sent, computer A polls the server for a response
-have Tag engine.vi check for staus requests from the server every 30 seconds or so.
-when it receives the request, it will write the status back to the server
-computer A reads the new string from the server and removes it.
*If you are just looking for anomalie values, treshold violations, periodic results etc, you may consider having computer B just sending you the status by e-mail. This is also very simple using an SMTP vi (not sure whether that requires the internet add-on).
*You can also have the two programs communicate with each other directly using TCP-IP vi's.
*You may also consider remote panels or the Labview web server.

aartjan

[Ben]

Hi Giovani,

I am a little confussed. From reading your other Q it appears you already understand how to use VI server.

Have you concidered using VI server to open a refrence to the "Get Engine Status.vi" on the target machine? You could then use that reference to do a call by reference to execute the VI on the target machine and then recieve the results back.

Just my first thought,

Ben

[Giovani]

That´s exactly what I´m doing, Ben !

I decided to ask you guys for help because, since there´ll be an application running on the machine the VI would be dynamically loaded, my first thought was this could cause some problems but, after doing some tests, I saw there would be no problems at all. But the test I did was to execute the subVI once and see what would happen to the machine´s CPU Usage and Memory Usage and I realized that both of them would rise up a little and then return to normal levels after the closure of the VI reference but, since in my real application the VI would be periodically dynamically loaded, I´m not sure if this is going to work well. I´ll see how it is going to work on my application and I´ll let everyone know if it worked !!


Thanks everyone for your help !!!

[Ben]

Please do report your findings!

I am always interested in better, faster ways of doing things.

Ben

[Joe_Guo]

I suggest to use either UDP or tcp/ip instead of datasocket.